Peasant Da Vincis

Posted on: December 10, 2014

A number of amateur inventors — dubbed “Peasant Da Vincis” — who have in recent years bashed together home made planes, helicopters and even tanks, apparently with little consideration of practical value.

They include a hairdresser from Zhejiang province, who built a one-seater airplane with wheels from a motorized wheelchair and a seat scavenged from a go-kart.

In late 2012 a farmer in Hebei province grabbed worldwide headlines ahead of the supposed Mayan apocalypse with a range of “survival pods” hewn from fiberglass. This year, the creations took a military turn when Jian Lin, a 31-year-old farmer, drove a homemade tank through a village in Sichuan province.